Optical Readout of Coherent Nuclear Spins Beyond the NV Center Electron T$_1$

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an optical readout method for nuclear spins beyond the NV center electron T1, enhancing sensitivity in NV-based gyroscopes by repolarizing electron spins to improve nuclear spin readout.

Contribution

It introduces an optical repump protocol to effectively read out nuclear spins after electron spin relaxation, surpassing previous limitations.

Findings

Six-fold sensitivity improvement at 500 G compared to 200 G

Effective electron spin repolarization enhances nuclear spin readout

Readout protocol mitigates spin flip-flop dynamics effects

Abstract

The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center is an emerging platform for constructing inertial sensors. Its native nitrogen spin can serve as a gyroscope using Ramsey interferometry protocols. The sensitivities of these nuclear-spin-based NV gyroscopes are limited by the phase coherence time of the nuclear spin, which is in turn limited by the $T_1$ of the NV center's electron spin. There is an active research effort to decouple the nuclear spin from the electron spin and other sources of decoherence to extend the phase coherence time past the NV center electron $T_1$. However, this presents an associated challenge -- how to readout of the nuclear spin ensemble if the electronic spins have relaxed into a thermal state. We introduce an optical repump pulse to repolarize electron spins and investigate its effect on the readout of nuclear spins in this regime. We find for ensemble-based sensors, our readout protocol has around a six-fold improvement in sensitivity around the excited state anti-level crossing at 500 G compared to low fields (200 G), despite the presence of deleterious spin flip-flop dynamics in the excited state.